Journey to the Virtual World

vRealize Operations 6.1 End Point: how to add metrics

[Update: Gal Zellermayer from the vRealize Operations product team corrected me. In End Point, you can only change interval in the resource level and not per individual metric. Thank you Gal for the expertise!]

Following the previous blogs, where I cover the End Point agent installation, I will now cover

how to enable additional metrics to be collected. vRealize Operations 6.1 comes with hundreds of metrics and properties. Not all of them are enabled, meaning data is not being collected. You can customise what vRealize Operations collect, by modifying the policy. Go to the Policy Library screen, as shown below.

From there, edit the policy you want by selecting it, then click on the edit (pencil) icon on top. A large dialog box, called Edit Monitoring Policy, opens. From here, go to Step 5. Collect Metrics and Properties. You will have something that looks like the following:

In my instance, it has 44,075 metrics, properties and supermetrics. That’s a lot of information that vRealize Operations can potentially collect and analyse for you. Certainly, you do not need most of them. In large scale implementation of vRealize Operations, I recommend you disable what you do not need. This will speed up performance and improve usability.

Back to End Point Operations. Click on the Object Type drop down. From there, go to EP Ops Adapter. Expand it, like what I have shown below. You can see AIX, HPUX, etc. Scroll down until you see the Guest OS that you need. In my case, I’m interested in Windows, and I have selected that.

Can you see how many metrics and properties does vRealize Operations have for Windows?

Yes, that’s 460. That’s a lot of information. We now have great visibility inside Microsoft Windows.

Browse through what you are after. They are Windows counter, although the name maybe different to what Windows call it. You can also use the Filter to filter the list. Enable the metric or property that you like. Properties is typically used in Configuration, while metric used in Performance or Capacity.

You can enable multiple lines at the same time. In the following example, I have selected a mix of properties and metrics. Go to Actions, choose State, then Enable.

Go ahead and enable what you need. You can move to the next set of metrics, without leaving the dialog box. At the end, click on Save button to close the dialog box.

Once you enable them, they will appear on the Windows objects within minutes. In the following screenshot, I have added Memory Commit Limit and Memory Committed Bytes, as I think they are good indicator whether Windows need more RAM or not.

You can also monitor the EP Agent itself. From the screenshot, you can see that it’s collecting more metrics now. I actually added something like 100 metrics, as I’m curious to see what happens to the agent performance 🙂 The good news is the JVM Free Memory remains constant. It did not drop drastically. The EP Agent uses Java. I’ve also verified that the JVM Total Memory is 24 MB. So we’re good here.

BTW, isn’t the icon cool? 🙂

At this junction, you may ask what counter is missing? One that I can think of is CPU Run Queue.